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Christmas Cards Made 2016

Thursday, 28 May 2015

Remember that rhyme? What fun we used to have when we were kids, chanting that rhyme on a hot summer day...

My card today is using up some more of the seashells that were featured on my recent Mermaid card.
I did colour up quite a few extra shells, so thought I had better just get them made up rather than create yet another UFO envelope.

I hand cut some heavy card to make a 5x7 tent fold card. I don't make tent folds very often as sometimes they do not want to stay upright! They can sort of "collapse" when displayed! Luckily, this one is standing up nicely.

I scribbled some Prismacolour pencils across the card front. Just a little bit of blue and a little of a tan colour. I blended them with gamsol and I think I they suggest a nice beachy feel...hopefully you think so too!
I merely arranged the shells, popping the starfish and the conch shell forward with some thin pop dots.

That it! A quick, simple and fun to make beach themed card. I left it with out a sentiment until I decide just what I will use it for.

Monday, 25 May 2015

It is the 25th of May and you all know what that means...you have 7 days to link up a Christmas card or Christmas project to my Rudolph Days Challenge.

Here is a quick refresher of the Rudolph Days Challenge rules. Don't forget we added a couple of new rules last month!

1. The Rudolph Days Challenge will start monthly on the 25th and will close on the last day of that month.
2. The theme is always Anything Goes, as long as it is Christmas.
3. One entry per person and you just need to enter one Christmas card or Christmas project. (You can have more than one on your post, but your post will still only count as one entry)
4. You may combine your entry with other challenges (maximum of 10 in total).
5. Your card (or Christmas project) should not have been previously posted to your blog. It should be posted to your blog during the current months Rudolph Days Challenge, (between the 25th and last day of the current month)
6. Please link back or at least mention the Rudolph Days Challenge.
7. Prizes will be shipped anywhere in the world.

8. The winner will be selected by random draw and announced on the first day of the following month.

This month we have Kath of Plain and Simple as our guest designer. Her paper pieced card is so adorable! Kath is a star at making multiples of cards, often for her grandchildren to give to their schoolmates. This is one of those cards...You can just see the field of multiple cards in the background!!!
Hope you will pop across to pay her a visit.

My card features an upcycled tower of penguins holding armloads of Xmas presents. I merely popped it onto a snippet of black card. This image was cut off an old Xmas card. I was delighted to rescue it from my UFO box as the theme for Christmas Card Club this fortnight was presents Zoe chose the theme and you can check out everyone's cards at the hyperlinks on my right sidebar.

My easel card base was cut at my local scrapbook store. If you buy your paper there, you can use their Accucut dies for free. I rolled off this particular die in various colours, so keep your eyes peeled as they will be showing up on other posts soon!

Here is a peek at the inside...

I am still working away at using up my stash. This card is an example of that. All the elements were tossed into a card sleeve quite some time ago and have been languishing in the UFO box for far too long.

Friday, 22 May 2015

I have a sea themed card for you today. A bright and fun version, perfect for a little girls birthday. I tried to pick hot, tropical colours and used lots of layers for texture and depth. This one is definitely a card for hand delivery! lol

The Stampendous Mermaid image was coloured with copics and has some Wink of Stella added to the scales, sea shells on her clothing and on her crown. I fussy cut and placed her on a vivid blue Spellbinders scalloped mat. I wanted that burst of colour to help her show up on my busy card.

I kept the background DP bright and fun as well. The dotty snippet is AC Hip Hip Hooray, but the orange piece is an unknown snippet from my bits box.

I tucked some cheesecloth behind the matted image and layered some fussy cut Studio G shells, I stamped them with Memento Rich Cocoa. Everytime I use cheesecloth, I am amazed at how easily it is to snag. Just the weight of your fingers can sort of tangle it all back up. I unfurled this piece I don't know how many times! If anyone has any better ideas, please share them with me! My hands are a bit rough from gardening...perhaps I need to wear rubber gloves with the cheesecloth! lol

The shells were given a light touch of colour with pencil crayons and then blended with gamsol. I went over some of the shell detail lines with a Jellyroll pen. Perhaps you can see it a little clearer here... It is much more sparkly IRL but very hard to capture in a photo today...

The sandcastle was fussy cut as well and has a bit of Wink of Stella added at random.

The final burst of glitzy colour comes from the swirly blue adhesived border strip which I hope looks like waves. I set that on top of a piece of fibre netting ribbon, to help hide the glue tape strip under it. That fibre netting ribbon is hard to stick onto a card!

Thursday, 21 May 2015

Just a quick reminder that the May Rudolph Days Challenge is fast approaching.

You can link up your cards from May 25th until May 31. Winner to be announced June 1st.

Here is a quick recap of the rules:

1. The Rudolph Days Challenge will start monthly on the 25th and will close on the last day of that month.
2. The theme is always Anything Goes, as long as it is Christmas.
3. One entry per person and you just need to enter one Christmas card or Christmas project. (You can have more than one on your post, but your post will still only count as one entry)
4. You may combine your entry with other challenges (maximum of 10 in total).
5. Your card (or Christmas project) should not have been previously posted to your blog. It should be posted to your blog during the current months Rudolph Days Challenge, (between the 25th and last day of the current month)
6. Please link back or at least mention the Rudolph Days Challenge.
7. Prizes will be shipped anywhere in the world.

8. The winner will be selected by random draw and announced on the first day of the following month.

Saturday, 16 May 2015

Many of you already know that Little Miss C and Little Mr P like to make cards. Truth be told, Little Mr P likes to make and sell his cards.

Now that we live so close to them, he is delighted to just pop by after school just to make a card or two...especially if there is a family members birthday approaching. He has figured out the odds of selling his card at this time are greatly improved!

Here is his latest card. I think it is so darn cute. I do help them a bit with the card design, but mostly they take out the little photo albums of dies I have already precut, and match them up to the images they have colored.

Little Mr P wanted to use that big yellow Spellbinders pointy circle frame type diecut, but the aperture was too big for his image. He mulled it over and decided that he could layer some other diecuts, and eventually the matted image would be the right size. Brilliant idea....and it made his card so darn cute!

The DP is all from my bits box. The stripey paper was chosen as it seemed to contain most of the colours of the layered mats. The dotty one was supposed to look like sky! The sentiment is a rub on and just sits on a hand cut banner flag.

The adorable little frog is from Stampin' Up and been given a shot of Stardust stickles. He is learning to stamp his own images now. He has the same trouble as I do with keeping the pressure on the image and sentiment evenly. I will have to remember to go over the sentiment with an extra fine black marker!

The grass diecut is another from my stash of precut ones. My stash is getting low now, so I should spend an evening rolling off some dies. Perhaps it is time to roll off some new ones that have never seen my Big Shot before!

When he was all finished, he turned to me and said "I will sell you this card for three dollars and you can give it to me for my birthday". I had to turn my head to the side so he would not see me smiling!
I did buy it from him, but had a different card ready for his special day...so will save this one for another day.

Tuesday, 12 May 2015

Little Mr P is 7 years old today. After school, he is having 31 kids to the Go Bananas Play Place for a party. You know, one of those standard invite everyone in the class as well as his pals party...

But the real birthday celebrations happened this weekend in 100 Mile House. That is where he chose to spend his family birthday weekend....camping and fishing at his Opa's cabin. 100 Mile is quite far from their home, an 8 hour round trip drive, so everyone was hoping for some trout for eating and for the freezer...

Now Little Mr P is something of a fish whisperer, so it was pretty well guaranteed that he would catch a fish. Her was trying to beat his all time weight record of a 4 pound Rainbow Trout...but even his wildest dreams never imagined one this size...a 6 pound 8 ounce Rainbow!

Best of all, he caught it with a fly rod...he was very proud of that fact. It took about 15 minutes to tire this fish out and by then he was too tired to net it himself. He had to get his Dad to do it.

His Mum and Dad are not comfortable with images of their children on the net, so I had to crop his grinning face out of the frame...but I am sure you can imagine the size of his smile!

Friday, 1 May 2015

Do you ever make a card, only to remake it later? That is what I have to share today!

I made this bird card on aqua shimmer cardstock last summer (or maybe even the summer before), while were up at the lake. It looked fine once finished, but within a few days the shimmer card base seemed to curl at the edges. It almost seemed like the base was too flimsy.

I added it to the UFO box and intended to remake it right away. Well...you what that really means! Yep, eons later and I finally redid it. I simply cut the card front down so that it looked like a homemade topper and matted that with some fairly heavy weight orangey DP.

Decided to pick up the aqua again and covered my card base with some inky darker aqua DP. Popped on my new "topper" and suddenly I liked this card again.

Just in case the camera does not pick up on it, the bird, the birdsnest, the flowers and the leaves, are all acrylic. The bird and the largest orange blossom are a separate piece of acrylic, pop dotted forward over the nest for some dimension.

The aqua pearlescent border strip is K and Co I think,,,I merely added some tiny pearls to the border and to the flower centers. The sentiment is a sticker...K and Co again, methinks!